The ending to the Manhattan murder manhunt, which commanded international speculation for six straight days and nights, could not have been more ordinary or everyday American. Over the course of a matter of hours, the intense fascination shifted from “who?” to “why?”
On Monday morning, in a McDonald’s branch at East Plank Road in Altoona, a railroad town in Pennsylvania, a young man ordered food and sat down to eat. An employee believed that the customer resembled the photograph of the partially visible face released by the New York Police Department investigating the early-morning assassination by handgun, on Wednesday, December 4th, of Brian Thompson (50). The United Healthcare chief executive was walking to a breakfast speaking engagement in midtown Manhattan unaccompanied.
Local police responded to the call from the fast food outlet. They arrived at about 9.15am to find the customer eating his meal.
“The officer quickly recognised the male as the suspect,” the deputy chief of Altoona police department, Derek Swope, reported on Monday night.
“And within several seconds of the first contact, he had asked the suspect if he had been in New York City recently. And that really invoked a physical reaction from the suspect. He became visibly nervous, kind of shaking at that question. And he didn’t really answer it directly.”
He didn’t have to. As it turned out, he was discovered to be carrying an exhaustive range of items that would appear to link him with the crime: a weapon – a “ghost gun” built from disparate, separate parts – matching that used in the fatal shooting; a suppressor or silencer; a series of false identifications including one matching the New Jersey identification used by the suspect in checking into a Manhattan hostel on the eve of shooting.
He also carried a document described as a manifesto elaborating on the rationale for carrying out the shooting.
“I do apologise for any strife and trauma but it had to be done,” read one segment. “These parasites had it coming.”
He was arrested on firearms charges and reportedly offered no resistance.
By Monday afternoon, his name was released: Luigi Mangione (26), a University of Pennsylvania graduate of engineering raised in Maryland, with more recent addresses in San Francisco and Hawaii.
Detectives from New York had arrived in Altoona by midafternoon to question Mangione about a murder that stands at a unique intersection of old-fashioned police work, a global digital fascination with the dramatic nature of the crime and a vicious general condemnation of the callous practice at the heart of the US private healthcare industry.
“I really couldn’t put it on one thing but if I had to it would be the release of that photograph,” the NYPD chief of detectives, Joseph Kenny, said on Monday when asked about the “linchpin” of their investigation. That image, obtained when the suspect lowered his face mask to converse with the receptionist at the upper Manhattan hostel where he had paid cash, was the only visual confirmation the city’s police department had to work with. There are more than18,000 closed-circuit television security cameras operational in Manhattan.
Brian Thompson was killed as he was walking towards a Hilton hotel, on West 54th Street and Sixth Avenue, where he was scheduled to give a morning conference talk. The shooting was caught on film, with the hooded, masked shooter who wore a grey backpack materialising into the frame and taking his time in firing the shots that killed the health executive. Further grainy images of the same person cycling towards Central Park pieced his movements together.
The cold poise of the shooting led to early speculation that it was carried out by a professional, contract killer. But that was quickly debunked as further evidence was released. The words “Deny”, “Delay” and “Depose”, interpreted by investigators as a reference to tactics used by healthcare companies to deny compensation to clients, were found etched into the shell casings left on the footpath. A bottle of water bought in a nearby Starbucks early that morning and the wrapping paper of a nutrition bar were recovered along with a burner phone with a partial fingerprint.
A painstaking trawl of Central Park recovered a grey backpack, which was removed for forensics. Inside was a jacket and Monopoly money. By then, investigators had assumed the suspect had left Manhattan, probably by a Greyhound bus from Port Authority at 34th and 8th. But much of this was supposition.
Until Monday morning, there was, for the general public, a fascinatingly phantasmagoric quality to the suspect. The details behind the murder made it apparent that it was informed by a grudge against the particular healthcare company. The public response across the US was, for many, shocking, with a deluge of online comments and memes either sarcastically or explicitly calling out the greed of private healthcare companies.
The suspect was portrayed as a vigilante in some of the online speculation. Many people offered personal examples of cases in which they or family members had been denied coverage by their healthcare providers on grounds they believed to be either spurious or callous. That antipathy towards the industry and the strange chutzpah of the assassination led to the digital portrayal of the suspect as an avenger for citizens everywhere.
For the family and colleagues of Thompson, who is survived by two sons and his wife, Paulette, the absence of public sympathy can only have made the past six days more painful and disorienting. It emerged that Thompson had received threats in the months before Wednesday’s shooting.
The fear for the investigators was that having slipped out of the city, the suspect could simply disappear. They must also have had private concerns that the general hostility towards the healthcare system might have dissuaded members of the public from acting if they happened to see anyone resembling the photograph image of the suspect. The FBI had offered a $50,000 (€47,5000 reward and the NYPD offered $10,000.
“Our officers have been working around the clock. Many of them did not go home to pursue this individual. It was crucial that we were able to remove him off the streets of America and we were going to seek him out no matter where he was,” said New York mayor Eric Adams on Monday.
“How did we do it? Good old-fashioned police work.”
The man-hours devoted to the investigation, including watching thousands of hours of footage of the days before the shooting, have been extraordinary. But for all that, investigators had no idea of the identity of the suspect prior to that call from McDonald’s.
Altoona is 450km west of Manhattan, in the Allegheny Mountains. On Monday night, the young man appeared in a nearby courthouse and was charged with murder of Thompson by New York prosecutors. By then, it was clear that Mangione, belonged to the gilded class of young Americans.
He was Ivy League-educated, a privately educated high school senior class valedictorian whose speech was broadcast on all the main news networks on Monday night and, as had been observed when that first image was circulated.
His family are prominent in Maryland, with his grandfather a philanthropist, after amassing a fortune through the development of nursing homes and country clubs in the greater Baltimore area. He did not appear to belong to a social grouping given to an extreme hatred of the US private health-insurance industry.
“Beyond shocked. It is unimaginable,” his former room mate RJ Martin said in a Monday evening interview. “I was room mates with him, friends, hiked, went to yoga. He did his best to be athletic and ... unfathomable knowing the kind person I saw in him. Never once talked about guns, never once talked about violence. He was absolutely not a violent person, as far as I could tell.”
Significantly, Martin did mention that Mangione had suffered with chronic back pain during their period of time living together which prohibited normal sports and social activities: a basic surfing lesson left him bedbound for a week.
It also emerged that Mangione had, in January, given a four-star review on Goodreads to Ted Kaczynski’s notorious critique, Industrial Society and Its Future. Kaczynski achieved permanent infamy as the Unabomber, embarking on an 18-year campaign of mail bombing people he saw as advancing the cause of technology, prior to his capture in 1995.
Whatever edged Luigi Mangione towards his own version of anti-capitalist extremism will be among the fascinations in what looks likely to become one of those high-profile American trials which chronicle stark falls from grace. Late on Monday night, a Mangione family statement declared its members “shocked and devastated”, and they offered their prayers to the family of Brian Thompson.
So as of now, an entirely modern Manhattan murder mystery has ended with the bleak finality of having destroyed the lives of two families.
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